In this talk, Penny Lee presents some preliminary results from her research into the personal diaries of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897â1941).
Blog Archives
Has the LSA Been a Generativist-Dominated Organisation?
Frederick J. Newmeyer University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and University of Washington There are two stories about how the field of linguistics (at least in the United States) reacted sociologically to the advent of generative grammar. I call…
Language in and out of society: Converging critiques of the Labovian paradigm
Johannes Woschitz University of Edinburgh The following text is based on and is, where appropriate, an elaboration of Woschitz (2019), a paper I have recently published and which is the centrepiece of my PhD thesis. A different title could have…
The journal WORD and the structural heritage of usage-based linguistics: Three functional tenets and an overarching principle
Enrico Torre UniversitĂ degli Studi di Genova The first issue of WORD was launched in 1945, announced on its front cover as âthe journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, devoted to the study of linguistic science in all…
Speech sounds in the field: Dynamical approaches to phonology after Maxwell and Einstein
Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff UniversitĂ€t Freiburg 1 The notion of field in physics The mutual interaction, i.e. attraction and repulsion, of bodies across space without direct mechanical contact, such as the movement of planets, gravity, magnetism, electricity, or light, posed a…
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, America, Article, Europe, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics
Pierre-Philippe Potier’s Elementa Grammaticae Huronicae (1745)
Zanna Van Loon University of Leuven Introduction Instead of imposing European languages, Catholic friars conducting missions in the Americas in the early modern period opted to learn indigenous tongues to more efficiently teach local communities the religious doctrine. To guarantee…
Tagged with: circulation of knowledge, grammar, missionary linguistics, New France, pierre-philippe potier
Posted in 18th century, America, Article, History, Missionary Linguistics
Posted in 18th century, America, Article, History, Missionary Linguistics
Lawyers, Linguists and Truthiness
Douglas Kibbee University of Illinois Are lies information? This was the question before the Supreme Court of Michigan in a 2016 case (People v. Harris, based on a 2009 incident). A police officer was charged with pulling a motorist out…
“Except in the case of Andrade”: Manuel J. Andrade’s Quileute (1933) on the questions of “drift” and “function”
Perry Wong University of Chicago While currently nearly unknown, Manuel J. Andrade (1885-1941)[1] is one of the central figures in the history of linguistics in the United States. He was a student of Boas at Columbia and an early methodological…
Tagged with: American languages, American structuralism, Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Sapir
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Structuralism
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Structuralism
From godly analogy to âdistant like floating cloudsâ: the inevitability of the Sino-Dene hypothesis and the scalability of comparative linguistics
Yukun Zeng University of Chicago 1. The Problem of Scaling in Language Classification Language classification is a matter of scale and scaling. Most basically, it assigns languages into mutually exclusive categories. The scale underpins the categorization but does not come…
Joseph Greenbergâs comparative notebooks
Judith Kaplan University of Pennsylvania In John Webster Spargoâs 1931 translation of Holger Pedersenâs contribution to the genre of Disziplingeschichte, readers are introduced to a legion of mostly well-bearded men, marching toward the âdiscoveryâ of the Comparative Method. Summing up…
Tagged with: Joseph Greenberg
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, History, Linguistics, Typology
Posted in 20th century, America, Article, History, Linguistics, Typology
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 